The hillside path has remained mostly unchanged in the last thirty years. The bushes and branches still need to be swept aside for us to pass, the wooden planks we call a staircase still creak with every step, and every time one of us opens our mouths, at least twelve flies get in with no regard for their own well-being. Only the view has changed—now we can see the skyscrapers they’ve erected in the city, across the villages below us. Marie swats a fly away from her water bottle. It does not leave. Leigh, Marie, and I often played here when we were young. The hills seemed so much bigger to us back then, ripe with danger and adventure. We would climb trees, play games, and get our clothes dirty from sunrise to sunset. Our mothers would inevitably scold us for making more work for them, and we would inevitably ignore them and do it again the next day. “Come on, slowpokes!” Leigh would shout. Leigh was a year older than us, so Marie and I considered her the de facto leader of us three, even if Marie didn’t want to admit it. “We’re not slow,” Marie might have said. “You’re just fast. Slow down, would you?” I would tail behind Marie closely, nodding along. We often played hide and seek. The hills were perfect for the game—one could hide in the brush, or up in a tree, or down in a crevice. She who was “it” could be standing right next to a hider and not even know, but the more we played, the more we became accustomed to usual hiding spots. That drove us to find better concealed spots, each more so than the last, and so games could take the entire day. The last game of hide and seek we played was at the end of summer, thirty years ago. I lost rock-paper-scissors, so I was “it.” I found Marie first. Marie liked to climb up trees, and when you climbed up a tree, you had no easy way of getting down without hurting yourself. That wasn’t something Marie liked to do, so she did her best to hide in the foliage. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t—and it didn’t this time, as I could see the purple in her shirt hiding in the leaves. I climbed up and tagged Marie before noon. This gave us the rest of the day to find Leigh. We spent a couple of hours looking for her until Marie shouted from below, “I found her! Catch her!” Leigh had hidden in a shrub and darted out the moment she was caught. She climbed around me like a monkey up the hillside path and I gave chase. We crossed into the steeper parts of the hill, where I couldn’t catch her nearly as easily. It was dangerous, but she’d done this before. Today was the end of summer, and Leigh probably wanted one last hurrah before school started. Sometimes, when I’m taking a long shower, or when I’m in bed at night and can’t sleep, I try to piece together the memories of what happened next in my mind, like a fuzzy jigsaw puzzle. I was chasing her up the path, and she was so far ahead of me. She didn’t even look back, but I guess she wasn’t really looking forward, either. Leigh had done this dozens of times. Maybe she was always lucky before. Maybe she was just unlucky now. Maybe a fly flew into her eye and she misjudged the distance to the cliff. Maybe she was just reckless. But regardless of why it happened, it happened—she turned the corner too fast, her foot slipped in the dirt, and Leigh went over the side. She stopped when she hit her head on a tree trunk. Marie was already at a lower elevation, so I told her to help while I ran back to the village. I asked Marie what happened once, ten years ago. She said that Leigh didn’t say anything afterwards. I didn’t ask her again. Marie and I reach the slope. “Leigh would be forty today,” I say. “The big four-oh.” “Can you really believe it’s been thirty years?” “Twenty-nine, really.” “Oh, details. But could you imagine? Leigh, settling down and maybe getting a desk job in Central.” I look down at the tree. “Who can say?”